In this photo illustration, the Facebook logo is displayed on the screen of an iPhone in front of a Meta logo on October 28, 2021 in Paris, France.
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Meta on Thursday debuted the Facebook Friends tab, a new feature that’s part of CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s pitch to revive the original spirit of his social networking app, or “OG Facebook” as he called it.
“The new Friends tab is a throwback to OG Facebook when you only saw friends’ status updates,” Zuckerberg said in a post about the feature. “More OG Facebook coming soon “
The Facebook Friends tab is designed to show users the latest posts from their friends instead of “recommended content,” the company said in a blog post. The friend-related content include stories, reels, posts, birthdays and friend requests.
The new tab marks a departure from the core Facebook feed, which is still the primary way users find and interact with content on the service. Meta has been increasingly using artificial intelligence to recommend content from across the social network that is tailored to users’ interests.
Zuckerberg hinted about “OG Facebook” during a January call with analysts for the company’s fourth-quarter earnings, saying he was “excited this year to get back to some OG Facebook.”
While “a lot of people use Facebook every day,” Zuckerberg in January said he believed that there are “a lot of opportunities” to make the app “more culturally influential than it is today.” Part of that effort includes a focus to “get back to how Facebook was originally used back in the day.”
Zuckerberg echoed that sentiment in his Thursday post, which showed a short video of the new feature and how it compared to the experience of using the social network in 2008 from a laptop.
Meta said that the new Friends tab is now available in the U.S. and Canada, but did not say when it would debut in other countries.
